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arXiv · 2606.08555

FAWAM: Force-Aware World Action Models for Closed-Loop Contact-Rich Manipulation

Haotian He·Zeyu Yan·Qipeng Liu·Ning Guo·Wenzhao Lian
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Abstract

Force signals provide critical interaction cues for contact-rich robotic manipulation. However, existing methods mostly use force as an additional observation modality, without fully exploiting its role in modeling future interaction dynamics or guiding execution-time feedback correction. In this paper, we propose FAWAM, a force-aware world action model that incorporates force information at three levels: perception, prediction, and closed-loop execution. FAWAM first encodes historical 6-axis force/torque signals to modulate action generation, then jointly predicts future actions and end-effector wrenches to explicitly model contact evolution. It further introduces a residual correction module that uses the predicted wrench trajectory as an execution-time reference to refine actions online based on real-time force feedback. Real-world experiments across multiple contact-rich tasks show that FAWAM improves the average success rate by 36.25% over vision-only baselines and 21.25% over existing force-aware baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our force-aware framework for robust contact-rich manipulation.

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Haotian He, Zeyu Yan, Qipeng Liu, Ning Guo, Wenzhao Lian. 2026-06-07. FAWAM: Force-Aware World Action Models for Closed-Loop Contact-Rich Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08555

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